Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

‘I’m so not coming here again’

Q: In a TV film I caught, an American teenager expostulates, “I’m so not coming here again.” I’ve been dimly aware of this “so not” construction for about 10 years, but till now I’ve never asked myself where it comes from and what it’s doing.

A: The “so not” in statements like this means “emphatically not,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The “so” is an intensifier that emphasizes the “not.”

You could paraphrase “I’m so not coming here again” as “I’m sure not [or definitely not or certainly not] coming here again.”

The usage has been found in published writing since the late 1990s, but it was undoubtedly heard sooner in casual speech. And as we’ll explain later, this use of “so” is a variation on a theme. In earlier incarnations, “so” is used similarly but without “not.”

The OED’s earliest example of “so not” in this kind of statement is “Napoleons are so not fun to eat” (New York Magazine, Aug. 25, 1997). The next two citations are both from novels:

“We guess communism just got buried in the rubble there somewhere. And those Ceauşescus? So not missed” (Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999).

“You’ve seen the carousel and it’s so not cool to be seen here if you’re over nine years old” (Jan M. Czech’s Grace Happens, 2005). Note that the author uses italics to emphasize “so,” reflecting the way the word is pronounced in this usage.

The OED includes those “so not” examples within a broader category, one in which “so” is used as “an intensifier, forming nonstandard grammatical constructions.” It describes these constructions as “slang” and “chiefly U.S.”

In the earliest such uses, the OED says, the word means “extremely, characteristically,” and modifies a noun, adjective, or adverb that “does not usually admit comparison.”

The dictionary’s earliest example, an outlier, is from Ronald Firbank’s 1923 novel The Flower Beneath the Foot: “What can you see in her? … She’s so housemaid.” Oxford calls this “an isolated use, apparently without influence on later development of the sense.”

The dictionary’s continuous examples begin with this one from the screenplay of Manhattan (1979), written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman: “Yale: ‘He’s a big Bergman fan, you know.’ Mary: ‘Oh, please, you know. God, you’re so the opposite! I mean, you write that absolutely fabulous television show.’ ”

The next citation, also from a film script, is a line in Heathers (1988), written by Daniel Waters: “Grow up, Heather. Bulimia’s so ’86.”

In the next variation on the theme, “so” is used to mean “definitely” or “decidedly” and modifies verbs, Oxford says. This usage was first recorded in the early 1990s, and again the OED’s earliest examples are from scripts—the first from a shooting draft for a film and the second for an eventual TV series:

“Oh thank you, Josh, I so need lessons from you on how to be cool” (Clueless, written by Amy Heckerling, 1994).

“We so don’t have time” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by Joss Whedon in 1996).

An article in Brill’s Content in August 2000 summed up expressions like these as “the sort of slangy, informal use of so you might hear a teen of the MTV set employ, as in: ‘Omigod, I would so marry Carson Daly if he asked me.’ ”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Expression Grammar Language Usage Writing

A few negative thoughts

Q: How do you interpret a negative construction with “or” rather than “and”? For example, “A pie without strawberries or cherries is awful”? Does it mean a pie needs both strawberries and cherries to not be awful? Or that just one or the other is necessary?

A: Most negative constructions with “or” and “and” are pretty straightforward. Here’s the difference:

“A pie without strawberries or cherries is awful” means both “A pie without strawberries is awful” and “A pie without cherries is awful.” In other words, a pie without one or the other is awful. The use of “or” indicates that the two coordinates, the strawberries and the cherries, are to be considered separately.

“A pie without strawberries and cherries is awful” means that a pie without both of them is awful. The use of “and” indicates that the two coordinates are to be considered together as a unit.

You may be thinking of the complications that arise when the word “both” appears in certain kinds of negative constructions. Here’s how Pat treats this problem in the 4th edition of her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

BOTH . . . NOT/ NOT BOTH. Using both and not in the same sentence is asking for trouble. That’s because saying something negative about both can be ambiguous. When you say, Both children did not get the flu, do you mean both escaped it? Or that just one—not both—got it? Put the negative part where it belongs: One of the children, not both, got the flu. Or drop both and use neither instead: Neither child got the flu.

In fact, any negative statement with both should be looked on with suspicion. A sentence like There are no symptoms in both children probably won’t be misunderstood. But it would be clearer and more graceful to drop both and use either: There are no symptoms in either child.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

Hard of sleeping?

Q: After reading your article about “hard” and “hardly,” my thoughts wandered to “hard of hearing.” Where did this originate? Would the opposite be “soft of hearing”? Why don’t we talk about “hard of seeing,” “hard of tasting,” etc.? I woke up at 3 a.m. thinking about this. Am I hard of sleeping?

A: The phrase “hard of” has been used in this way since the early 14th century. And yes, it’s been used for other things that some people find hard to do—like seeing, believing, and understanding. Here’s the story.

Since Old English, “hard” has been both an adjective (firm, solid, unyielding, difficult to do) and a noun (for a difficult experience or difficult times), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The noun “hard,” in the sense of a hardship or difficult times, was often linked with “nesh” (something soft). So the expression “in nesh and hard” meant in all circumstances—that is, in easy times and hard.

The OED’s first citation for the noun is from a riddle in a 10th-century poem: “Him on hand gæð heardes and hnesces” (“Into its hand goes hard and soft”). From Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn in The Red Book of Darley, MS 422, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

(In the riddle, Saturn asks “what is the wonder” that feeds on “all that dwell on the ground, fly in the air, swim in the sea”? Solomon answers, “Old age is powerful over all things on earth.” It “destroys the tree,” “defeats the wolf,” “outwits the rocks,” “bites iron with rust,” and “does the same to us.”)

In the early 14th century, writers began using the noun in various phrases with the sense of a difficulty, hardship, misfortune, and so on, the OED says.

The dictionary’s first citation is from Guy of Warwick, a Middle English romance dating from around 1330 or earlier: “Y com fram Lombardy, Of hard y-schaped for þe maistrie” (“I come from Lombardy, from hardship of the highest degree”).

Of course, the noun today is used much less than the adjective, which is where your question comes in.

In its earliest uses, the adjective meant firm and unyielding, as in heard ssweord (hard sword), a phrase recorded in Beowulf, possibly written as early as the 700s.

Here’s a similar use, from a collection of Old English medical remedies copied into a 10th-century manuscript known as Bald’s Leechbook:

“Wiþ heardum swile þæs magan” (“For a hard swelling of the stomach”). The title of the manuscript comes from its Latin colophon, or publication details: “Bald habet hunc librum Cild quem conscribere iussit” (“Bald owns this book, which he ordered Cild to compile”).

At the same time, the adjective was being used to mean difficult or hard to accomplish, as in this OED citation: “Þa þuhte me swiðe heard & uneaðe” (“That seems to me very hard & not easy”). From Bishop Wærferth’s translation, done in the late 800s or early 900s, of Gregory’s Dialogues, which were written in Latin the sixth century.

And in Middle English, the combination “hard + of” took on the sense you’re asking about. Oxford says the adjective was coupled with “of” (also sometimes “to” or “in”) to describe a person “not easily able to do something or capable of doing something”—a usage that survives today (excepting humorous examples) only in the phrase “hard of hearing.”

The dictionary’s earliest known example for “hard of” is in the anonymous Middle English poem Cursor Mundi, written sometime before 1325: “Men sua herd of vnder-stand” (“Men are hard of understanding”).

The phrase “hard of hearing” appeared in writing more than two centuries later: “The testatrixe was hard of hearinge.” From a deposition in a 1564-65 case about a will, cited in Child-Marriages, Divorces, and Ratifications, etc. in the Diocese of Chester, 1897, edited by Frederick James Furnivall for the Early English Text Society.

Finally, here are a few unusual “hard of” usages from the OED:

“To those that are dull and hard of vnderstanding, or long time besieged with euill customes, the rust of their mindes must be rubbed off” (from The Workes of Lucius Annæus Seneca, 1614, translated from the Latin by Robert Lodge).

“They are hard of digestion, causing nauseating eructations” (Dictionnaire Oeconomique; or, The Family Dictionary, 1725, by Richard Bradley). The subject is radishes.

“In Portugal men are melancholy, sanguine, and robust, but slow and hard of intellect” (Werner’s Magazine, January 1896).

“Riots, too, are a form of language in which the voiceless get the attention of those who are ‘hard of listening’ ” (The Drama of Social Life, 1990, by T. R. Young).

May you be soft of sleeping the next time 3 a.m. comes along.

[Update, Oct. 24, 2020. A reader sent this excerpt from “The Smelly Car” episode of Seinfeld, first aired April 15, 1993: “Jerry: ‘Boy, do you smell something?’ Elaine: ‘Do I smell something? What am I, hard of smelling?’ ”]

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Phrase origin Usage Writing

Like as the waves

Q: I have a question about this passage from Shakespeare: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore.” I’ve never seen “like as” used this way before. Is it a poetic usage? Or was it once more common?

A: The use of “like as” to introduce a clause, a group of words with its own subject and verb, was once fairly common, but it’s now considered colloquial, nonstandard, obsolete, or rare.

When “like as” introduced a clause, the word “like” was “an emphatic modifier” of “as,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And the dropping of “as” from “like as” probably contributed to the use of “like” by itself to introduce a clause, a usage often criticized by sticklers.

As the OED explains, “the use of like as a conjunction,” which was “often deprecated by usage writers and prescriptivists during the 19th and 20th centuries,” was probably influenced by “an ellipsis of as in the phrasal conjunction like as.”

(As we note in a 2013 post, “like” had introduced clauses for hundreds of years before language commentators began objecting to the usage.)

When the phrase “like as” first appeared in the late 14th century (spelled “lich as,”), it meant “as if” or “as though,” a usage that the OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, labels colloquial or nonstandard now.

In the first Oxford citation, which we’ve expanded, the Roman Emperor Constantine is suffering from leprosy. But as he’s baptized, his skin lesions fall off and lie in the water like fish scales:

“And evere among the holi tales / Lich as thei weren fisshes skales, / Ther fellen from him now and eft / Til that ther was nothing beleft.” From Confessio Amantis (circa 1391), a Middle English poem by John Gower.

In the early 15th century, “like as” came to mean in the manner that, to the same extent as, just as, etc., senses that are now obsolete. The OED cites a 1414 entry in the rolls, or records, of Parliament:

“We … ne oughte not to answere lyk as bondemen of byrthe shulde, for the whiche the forseide Statut was made.” From Rotuli Parliamentorum (1767-77), edited by John Strachey.

A bit later in the 15th century, “like as” began being used “for emphasis or clarity” when introducing a subordinate clause “preceding the main clause introduced by anaphoric so,” according to Oxford. (The anaphoric so here refers readers to the subordinate clause).

The OED, which describes the usage as rare now, cites a manuscript, circa 1425, at the British Library: “Like as lecteture [a lecture] put thyng in mende [mind] / Of lerned men, ryght so a peyntyde fygure / Remembryth [reminds] men unlernyd in hys kende” (from Cotton MS Julius B. XII in Reliquiæ Antiquæ, 1845, edited by Thomas Wright et al.).

The passage from Shakespeare that you’re asking about introduces a subordinate clause at the beginning of Sonnet 60: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end.”

We’ll end with an expanded OED citation from Agnes Grey (1847), Anne Brontë’s first novel. Here Nancy Brown uses “like as” in the sense of “as if” as she tells Agnes about hearing Edward Weston, the curate, read to her:

“An’ then he took that Bible, an’ read bits here and there, an’ explained ’em as clear as the day: and it seemed like as a new light broke in on my soul; an’ I felt fair aglow about my heart, an’ only wished poor Bill an’ all the world could ha’ been there, an’ heard it all, and rejoiced wi’ me.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Linguistics Usage Word origin Writing

What’s up with ‘below’?

Q: Merriam-Webster describes “below” as an adverb in these two examples: “gazed at the water below” and “voices from the apartment below.” My understanding is that adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. But “below” here is modifying two nouns, “water” and “apartment.” So what am I missing?

A: You raise a very good question. As it happens, linguists have asked themselves the same thing, and in the last few decades they’ve abandoned the traditional thinking about the status of “below” and similar words that express spatial relationships.

Traditionally, “below” has been classified as either a preposition or an adverb. It’s a preposition if an object follows, as in “the water below the bridge” and “the apartment below ours.” It’s an adverb if it doesn’t have an object, as in “the water below” and “the apartment below.” As far as we can tell, that’s been the thinking among grammarians since the late 18th century.

But as we’ll explain later, linguists now regard “below” solely as a preposition, a view reflected in recent comprehensive grammar books but not yet recognized in popular grammars and standard dictionaries.

Of course, for all practical purposes the word hasn’t changed, either in its meaning or in the way it’s used. In the scholarly comprehensive  grammars, the word has merely shifted in some cases from one lexical category (adverb) to another (preposition).

Standard dictionaries haven’t yet caught up to this new way of thinking about “below.” The 10 standard dictionaries we usually consult say it can be either an adverb or a preposition in constructions like those above.

Cambridge, for example, calls it a preposition in “below the picture” but an adverb in “the apartment below.” The dictionary adds: “When the adverb below is used to modify a noun, it follows the noun.” (We know what you’re thinking: An adverb modifying a noun? Stay tuned.)

Despite the differing labels, the adverb and the preposition have virtually the same meaning. By and large, the standard dictionaries that define them say the adverb means “in or to a lower position” or “beneath,” while the preposition means “lower than” or “beneath.”

And in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, the broad definitions for the adverb and the preposition are identical: “Expressing position in or movement to a lower place.”

As we mentioned above, this view of “below” and words like it has a long history. Some similar words of this kind, prepositions that have traditionally been called adverbs when used without an object, include these:

“aboard,” “about,” “above,” “across,” “after,” “against,” “ahead,” “along,” “around,” “before,” “behind,” “below,” “beneath,” “besides,” “between,” “beyond,” “by,” “down,” “for,” “in,” “inside,” “near,” “off,” “on,” “opposite,” “out,” “outside,” “over,” “past,” “round,” “since,” “through,” “throughout,” “to,” “under,” “underneath,” “up,” “within,” “without.”

For example, Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners (1795), says that in some instances a preposition “becomes an adverb merely by its application.” The word “since,” he says, is a preposition in “I have not seen him since that time” and an adverb in “Our friendship commenced long since.”

Murray also says, “The prepositions after, before, above, beneath, and several others, sometimes appear to be adverbs, and may be so considered,” giving as an example “He died not long before.” But when a complement follows, he writes, the word is a preposition, as in “He died not long before that time.”

A generation later, the philosopher John Fearn echoed Murray, referring to “the known Principle” that prepositions at the end of a sentence “become Adverbs by Position.”

Fearn also distinguishes between prepositions that require an object (like “with” and “from”) and those that don’t (like “through”). Those in the second group, he says, are “prepositional adverbs” when they’re used without an object (as in “He went through”).

(From Fearn’s Anti-Tooke: Or an Analysis of the Principles and Structure of Language, Vol. II, 1827, an extended argument against the language theories of John Horne Tooke.)

As we said above, the traditional view persists in standard dictionaries but is no longer found in up-to-date comprehensive grammar. Thinking began to change in the late 1960s, when some academic linguists began questioning the “adverb” label and widening the definition of “preposition.”

In the early ’90s, the linguist Ronald W. Langacker gave four examples of “below” as a preposition—“the valley below; the valley below the cliff; A bird flew below; A bird flew below the cliff.” (From “Prepositions as Grammatical(izing) Elements,” published in the journal Leuvense Bijdragen, 1992.)

Note that in those examples “below” is classified as a preposition (1) whether it’s used alone or with a complement, and (2) whether it follows a noun or a verb—thus resembling an adjective in one case (“valley below”) and an adverb in the other (“flew below”).

Most linguists today would agree with that interpretation: “below” and words like it are prepositions. Used with a complement, they’re said to be “transitive prepositions”; used without one, they’re “intransitive prepositions.”

The newer interpretation has only gradually made its way into major books on English grammar.

For example, the old view persisted at least through the publication in 1985 of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph Quirk et al. It uses the terms “postmodifying adverb” and “prepositional adverb” for “below” and similar words in constructions like these.

A “postmodifying adverb,” according to the Comprehensive Grammar, is identical to a preposition except that it has no complement and modifies a preceding noun. Examples given include “the sentence below” … “the way ahead” … “the people behind.”

A “prepositional adverb,” the book says, is identical to a preposition but has no complement and modifies a verb. Examples include “She stayed in” … “A car drove past.

The word is a preposition, according to Quirk, only if a complement is present (and regardless of what it seems to modify). Examples include “below the picture” … “She stayed in the house” … “A car drove past the door.

The Comprehensive Grammar doesn’t use the words “transitive” and “intransitive” for prepositions, but it comes close: “The relation between prepositional adverbs and prepositional phrases may be compared to that between intransitive and transitive uses of certain verbs.”

The next exhaustive grammar book to come along, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), does use those terms. In this book, words that Quirk had previously classified as either postmodifying adverbs or prepositional adverbs are newly categorized as prepositions. The Cambridge Grammar uses “transitive” for prepositions that have a complement, “intransitive” for those that don’t—and it’s the first important English grammar to do so.

The book calls “in” and “since” intransitive prepositions here: “He brought the chair in” … “I haven’t seen her since.” And it calls them transitive prepositions here: “He put it in the box” … “I haven’t seen her since the war.”

The authors of the Cambridge Grammar, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, don’t discuss “below” at length, but they do say that it “belongs only to the preposition category.” It’s also included among a list of prepositions that are used with or without a complement, and these examples show it without one: “the discussion below” … “the room below.

Huddleston and Pullum essentially redraw the boundary between prepositions and adverbs, defining prepositions more broadly than “traditional grammars of English.” In this, they say, they’re “following much work in modern linguistics.” And they give two chief reasons why they  reject the traditional view and reclassify words like “below” as prepositions.

(1) The traditional view “does not allow for a preposition without a complement.” The Cambridge Grammar argues that the presence or absence of a complement has no bearing on the classification. So “the traditional definition of prepositions,” one that says they require a complement, is “unwarranted.”

The book makes an important point about these newly recognized prepositions. Their ability to stand alone, without a complement, “is not a property found just occasionally with one or two prepositions, or only with marginal items,” the book says. “It is a property found systematically throughout a wide range of the most central and typical prepositions in the language.”

(2) The “adverb” label is inappropriate for words like “below” because they don’t behave like adverbs. In “The basket is outside,” for instance, the word “outside” is traditionally defined as an adverb. But as the authors point out, typical adverbs, such as those ending in “-ly,” aren’t normally used to modify forms of the verb “be.”

That role is normally played by adjectives, or by prepositions of the kind we’re discussing—“inside,” “outside,” “above,” “below,” and so on. And such words, the authors write, “no more modify the verb than does young in They are young.”

[Here you might ask, Then why aren’t these words adjectives? “Below” certainly looks like an adjective in uses like “the water below.” The Cambridge Grammar discusses this at length and gives reasons including these: Prepositions can have objects but adjectives can’t. Prepositions are fixed, while adjectives can be inflected for degree (as in “heavy,” “heavier,” “heaviest”) or modified by “very” and “too.” As we wrote on the blog in 2012, the adjectival use of “below” premodifying a noun, as in “Click on the below link,” is not generally accepted.]

In summary, Huddleston and Pullum suggest that if an “-ly” adverb cannot be substituted for the word, then it’s not an adverb. And if a complement could be added (as in “The basket is outside the door”), then it’s not an adverb.

The next influential scholarly grammar to be published, the Oxford Modern English Grammar (2011), written by Bas Aarts, reinforces and builds on this distinction between transitive and intransitive prepositions. And it includes “below” in a list of prepositions that can be used either way—with or without a complement.

Aarts also discusses prepositions that follow a verb and can either stand alone or have a complement: “We might go out” or “We might go out for a meal “I shall probably look in” … or “I shall probably look in at the College.”

In short, modern developments in linguistics have given “below” a new label—it’s a preposition, and only a preposition. The traditional view lives on in dictionaries, and no doubt it will persist for quite some time. But in our opinion, the new label makes more sense.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

When ‘even’ looks odd

Q: I was reading this verse in the King James Version of the Bible: “Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and pourtray upon it the city, even Jerusalem.” Ezekiel 4:1. What does “even” mean here? Is it an adverb?

A: In that biblical passage, “even” is an adverb meaning “namely,” “truly,” “that is to say,” or “in other words.” Here’s the verse with modern English in brackets:

“Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and pourtray upon it the city, even [namely] Jerusalem.”

The usage is now archaic, but as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “even” was once “prefixed to a subject, object, or predicate, or to the expression of a qualifying circumstance, to emphasize its identity, or to reinforce the assertion being made about it.”

Although the phrase “the city, even Jerusalem” is used in the King James Version and “a city, even Jerusalem” in the English Standard Version, some other translations of the Bible don’t use “even” but make clear in other ways that the city mentioned is Jerusalem.

Here, for example, is the passage in the New International Version: “Now, son of man, take a block of clay, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it.” And here is the passage in the New American Standard Bible: “Now you son of man, get yourself a brick, place it before you, and inscribe a city on it, Jerusalem.”

This prefixed use of “even” first showed up in Old English, with “even” spelled efne. The earliest OED citation is from an account of the life of St. Guthlac of Crowland, an Anglo-Saxon warrior who became a Christian monk and later a hermit on an island in the fens, or marshland, of Crowland in eastern England:

“He fyrngewyrht fyllan sceolde þurh deaðes cyme, domes hleotan, efne þæs ilcan þe ussa yldran fyrn frecne onfengon” (“He must accept his fate to gain glory through the coming of death, even [that is to say] the same fate our parents of old accepted”). From Guthlac B, an Old English manuscript based on Vita Sancti Guthlaci (Life of Guthlac), an 8th-century Latin work by Felix of Crowland, an East Anglian monk.

Although the OED considers this use of “even” archaic, it still shows up occasionally in modern fiction that strives for a feel of ancient times. The most recent Oxford citation, for example, is from The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), by J. R. R. Tolkien: “Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even [truly] thou shalt find it.”

If you’d like to read more, we wrote a post a few years ago about some modern uses of the word “even.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Politics Usage Word origin Writing

Come hell or high water

Q: I was wondering if you know the origin of the expression “come hell or high water.” I just used it to say I intend to vote in November come hell or high water. I must have learned it from my mother, who used many colorful sayings that I don’t hear anymore

A: Before getting to that expression, let’s look at the word “hell,” which has been used in a hell of a lot of ways since it first appeared in Old English writing, first as the dwelling place of all the dead, then as a place where the wicked were punished after death.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Vespasian Psalter, a ninth-century manuscript in Latin and Old English that uses the term to mean “the abode of departed spirits” and “a place of existence after death.”

In the citation, the Latin passage “veniat mors super illos et descendant in infernum viventes” is translated in Old English as “cyme deað ofer hie & astigen hie in helle lifgende” (“let death come upon them and descend into the living hell”).

The first OED citation for “hell” used in the sense of “the dwelling place of devils and condemned spirits” and “the place or state of punishment of the wicked after death” appeared in the 10th-century Blickling Homilies:

“Se gifra helle bið a open deoflum & þæm mannum þe nu be his larum lifiaþ” (“The greedy hell is open to the devil and the men who now live by his teaching”).

Notions of hell have inspired many expressions over the years, including “until hell freezes over” (meaning never, 1832); “to hell and back again” (a very long way, 1844); “raise hell” (cause great trouble, 1845); “to hell and gone” (to ruin or destruction, 1863); and “not a hope in hell” (impossible, 1923).

The expression you’re asking about—“come hell or high water,” meaning despite all obstacles—first appeared a century and a half ago in a somewhat different form. The earliest OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from a congressional report on a disputed 1870 House race in Arkansas.

In testimony on May 25, 1871, a witness notes that Gov. Powell Clayton intended to run for the US Senate, and quotes him indirectly as saying, “they might fight him as much as they were a mind to, but he was going there in spite of hell and high water.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for the exact phrase you use is from Land Below the Wind, a 1939 memoir by Agnes Newton Keith about her life in North Borneo (now Sabah). Here’s an expanded version of the citation:

“Too puny a voice mine to say, like Queen Victoria, ‘Let empires be built!’—and, come hell or high water, they build ’em. Likewise too untutored a mind mine to attempt the argument, ‘Let empires be destroyed!’—and, come hell or high water, they blast ’em.”

Although your version of the expression is the usual one, the OED notes that the conjunction linking “hell” and “high water” is sometimes “and,” “also,” or “nor.”

Getting back to the early beginnings of “hell,” John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says that etymologically it means “a hidden place.” Its ultimate source is a prehistoric Proto-Indo-European root that’s been reconstructed as kel- (cover, hide).

Ayto says the “cover” sense of the ancient root gave English the word “hall” while the “hide” sense gave it “hell,” so “hall and hell were originally ‘concealed or covered places,’ although in very different ways: the hall with a roof, hell with at least six feet of earth.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Punctuation Spelling Word origin Writing

How to say ‘satiety’

Q: We grew up pronouncing “satiety” as SAY-she-uh-tee, which is very close to the French it comes from. The influence of Spanish is forcing the pronunciation to suh-TIE-uh-tee. I like the way we learned it as children.

A: We haven’t seen any evidence that Spanish is responsible for the usual modern pronunciation of “satiety” (suh-TIE-uh-tee) or that French inspired the less common pronunciation (SAY-she-uh-tee). In fact, the Spanish version of the word (saciedad) doesn’t have a “t” sound, and the French version (satiété) doesn’t have an “sh” sound.

English has had quite a few different spellings and pronunciations of “satiety” (the state of being filled with food, drink, etc.) since it adopted the word from Latin and Middle French in the 16th century. In fact, the Latin and Middle French versions of the term were also spelled and pronounced in different ways.

In classical Latin, the term was satietas (sufficiency, abundance), but in post-classical Latin it was sacietas as well as satietas, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Middle French, it was satieté and sacieté. And in Anglo-Norman, which greatly influenced Middle English, it was sacieté and sazietet. The “c” in these terms was pronounced like “s” before the vowel “i.”

When “satiety” showed up in the early modern English writing in the 1500s, the second syllable could begin with either a “t” or a “c.” Here are some of the 16th-century spellings cited in the OED: “saciete,” “sacietee,” “sacietye,” “satietie,” and “satiety.” Before spelling was formalized in modern English, words tended to be spelled as they were pronounced.

Skipping ahead a few centuries, “satiety” was usually pronounced suh-SIGH-uh-tee in the late 18th century, according to the lexicographer John Walker, who nevertheless thought it should be pronounced suh-TIE-uh-tee.

In A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), Walker says “the second syllable has been grossly mistaken by the generality of speakers” and pronounced like “the first of si-lence, as if written sa-si-e-ty.” So ”satiety” sounded at the time much like “society.”

The pronunciation of “satiety,” according to Walker, was “almost universally confounded with an apparently similar, but really different, assemblage of accent, vowels, and consonants” in “satiate” (pronounced SAY-she-ate) and similar words.

In other words, Walker believed that the pronunciation of “satiate” was influencing that of “satiety.” And as we say in a 2010 post, we suspect that this influence inspired the SAY-she-uh-tee pronunciation of “satiety.”

In modern English, the OED notes, the letter “t” has an “sh” sound “in the combinations -tion, -tious, -tial, -tia, -tian, -tience, -tient, after a vowel or any consonant except s.”  (The words “nation,” “militia,” and “patience” are good examples.) But “t” is not usually pronounced “sh” in the combination “-tie” (as in “satiety”).

Eight of the ten online standard dictionaries we regularly consult offer only one pronunciation for “satiety,” either suh-TIE-i-tee or suh-TIE-uh-tee. The remaining two, Merriam-Webster and Merriam-Webster Unabridged, add SAY-she-uh-tee as a “secondary variant” that “occurs appreciably less often.”

Our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (a predecessor of the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged), includes only one pronunciation, suh-TIE-eh-tee, which suggests that SAY-she-uh-tee showed up in the last six decades.

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.

Categories
English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Usage Word origin Writing

The polka in polka dots

Q: I’m wondering if the “polka dot” pattern has any connection to the “polka” dance.

A: Yes, we can connect the dots here. The term “polka dot” comes from the dance in 2/4 time (two quarter notes per bar), which was especially popular in the 19th century. During the polka craze, the name was often attached to fabrics, clothing, and fashion accessories as a marketing tactic.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “The use of polka as a commercial name developed in the 1840s due to the huge popularity of the dance in that period.”

The name of the dance, according to the dictionary, was used “prefixed to or designating various items, esp. textiles, fashion accessories, or articles of clothing, as polka hat, polka pelisse, etc.”

Elsewhere in its entry for the noun “polka,” the dictionary mentions “polka jacket,” “polka gauze,” and “polka curtain-band” (for looping up curtains). The OED adds that the usage is “now historical except in polka dot.”

The first Oxford citation for “polka” used as a commercial prefix is from the Nov. 8, 1844, issue of the Times (London): “Splendid and magnificent novelties … the Czarina, the Polka Pelisse, and Marquise Pelerine.”

The dictionary’s earliest example for “polka dot,” which we’ll expand here, is from the May 1857 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a magazine published in Philadelphia: “Scarf of muslin, for light summer wear. It is surrounded by a scalloped edge, embroidered in rows of round polka dots; two full volantes, or flounces are edged with the same.”

As for the dance, it originated in the Czech region of Bohemia in the 19th century, according to the OED, and spread through Europe and the US. The dictionary says the name ultimately comes from polka, a Czech term for a Polish woman; it’s the feminine form of polák, Czech for Pole.

Oxford says the dance was “probably so named as an expression of sympathy with the Polish uprising of 1830-1” against the Russian Empire, but it adds that “the earliest English examples present difficulties.”

Although the dance may have been named for the Polish cadets who rose up against the Russians, the term “polka” had appeared a few years earlier in the US, apparently in reference to a musical composition used to accompany a dance rather than to a dance itself.

The dictionary says the use of “polka” for “a piece of music typically written in 2/4 time as the accompaniment to a characteristic dance” appeared first in Miss George Anna Reinagle Music Book for Fancy Tunes, an 1825 manuscript by Pierre Landrin Duport at the Library of Congress. The citation consists of the word “polka” alone. Duport was a French-born musician and dancing teacher in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.

The OED’s first clear example of “polka” used for the dance itself is from a letter written in 1837 by Mary Austin Holley, author of the first known English-language history of Texas. Here’s an expanded version of the citation:

“It was announced that a Mr. Karponky & his scholars would dance the grand Polka. He is a Pole—has taught 3,000 persons the Polka in these U.S.” From Letters of an Early American Traveller: Mary Austin Holley, Her Life and Her Works (1933), by  Mattie Austin Hatcher.

Finally, here are a couple of obsolete polka terms cited by the OED, along with their earliest appearances: “polkery,” a noun for a polka dance party (“Morning polkeries in Grosvenor-square,” 1845) … “polkaic,” an adjective meaning polka-like (“He thought Offenbach too polkaic,” 1884).

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation. And check out our books about the English language and more.

Subscribe to the blog by email

Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. If you’re a subscriber and not getting posts, please subscribe again.